What do blogger relations and Whitepages.com have in common? I am having a hard time drawing good connections and as far as bloggers and directory companies go “I should get it” more than most: I spent roughly eight years of my corporate life at Verizon Information Services / a.k.a. Superpages.com. That probably makes one of the most experienced social media / phone directory professionals online these days.

Today’s topic: (From the Whitepages.com Blog) “Last Friday on the heels of a wildly successful Lunch 2.0 the WhitePages PR team entered a new world of “influential relations” as we hosted our first ever “Blogger Day.” Unsure of what to expect, we knew what we wanted to accomplish: Reveal our full product roadmap to a group of industry bloggers and hope they would fall over backwards with praise for our innovative vision and transparent outreach.”

Normally the Lunch 2.0 idea is a pretty nifty one. You get a bunch of bloggers and enthusiast together to talk about a topic and have the event sponsored by a local company. The whole idea is to keep things simple, transparent, informational, and not-too-corporate. In this Lunch 2.0 you had Jott, Urbanspoon, and Whitepages.com.

Unfortunately I think the whole thing goes awry when you suddenly have a PR powerhouse (Edelman) jump into the fray and they try to turn an event into something it is not.

Big public relation firms still have a problem understanding: Simple? Not-too-corporate?

David Berkowitz was one of the bloggers flown in to attend and participate the Lunch 2.0 event put on by Whitepages. Whitepages/Edeleman requested that he disclose the arrangement, but while that disclosure may avoid audience members accusing him of bias, it does nothing to help prevent a review of the effectiveness of promotional investment.

To fly one blogger out (all expenses paid)

• $500 - New York to Seattle airfair: (Delta coach, via Expedia.com)
• $500 - 2 nights, luxury Hotel 1000
• $250 - Limo Shuttle - Shuttle Express, to and from airport
• $150 - Gift Basket in hotel room

With just the basic four items, the budget is shooting towards $1400 to $2000 per blogger invited and comped.

As a side note: David is a bright mind in the online marketing world, but his review of the Lunch 2.0/Whitepages.com was more about his trip and love of our great city, rather than worthwhile coverage of a new product/idea. I’ve browsed David’s writing for a while now and he usually offers a fresh viewpoint of things with a good dose of character.

Multiplying the $2k budget out to more “celebrity bloggers” creates a fairly hefty price tag, per John DeRosa- SeekNuance “Great food spread, +1 to Whitepages. There were at least 200 people there.” For a more accurate number with profiles: Upcoming.org had 74 attending and 39 watching (200 total may be accurate).

Welcome to the world of major public relations.

I’m not going to claim that even a large percentage of the attending bloggers were comped, but even a small handful of 5 to 10 quickly brings in a $10 to $20k public relations budget for somewhat limited exposure via social media. I would assume that Michael Arrington (moderator) from TechCrunch received (or turned down) a similar travel package.

There are three main problems with this scenario.

They all revolved around the statement “wildly successful Lunch 2.0”

1- Buying buzz is generally bad. Edelman should know this.

The strange part of trying to buy “buzz” on a blogger relations campaign is simply that very few are going to blog about it unless they are personally involved with it, and even then they may not. I still have not found a post from Michael Arrington about it (and he was the moderator!)

Many local Seattle bloggers attended, such as John Cook (John Cook’s Venture Blog, SeattlePI) who covered the event with a variety of bullet points. Other Seattle personalities were Josh Maher (Seattle Lunch 2.0), Joe Pruitt (DevCentral), Dave Schappell (No Snivelling) and many, many more.

2- Return on Investment.

I know that ROI is an evil term in the world of public relations. Fuzzy math is a controlling factor in traditional PR campaigns. However in social media and online networking there are dozens of factors that indicate penetration, acceptance, and response to a buzz campaign. For an example of a negative buzz campaign- check out the spin caused around corporate media reputation from one post.

The Local Mobile Search blog gave the overall best statement about Connectory “soon users will be able to leave voicemail messages for one another or send text messages to registered users’ cellphones, all via the site.” and the post in question had no more “buzz” or conversation leading off from it.

Looking through analytic results for Google, Technorati, and several aggregation services- there were only a handful of mentions online about the whole event (and including the LocalMobileSearch blog, only one or two about Whitepages.com’s Connectory project.)

3- Offending the community.

I doubt many of the 200 attendees were comped with multi-thousand dollar travel packages. The ones who did attend from the local area were interested in technology and networking with like-minded personalities. Most of them were probably more excited to meet Mike Arrington than be subjected to a corporate powerpoint presentation (Whitepages found that out “In the future we won’t be using PowerPoint to brief bloggers.”)

Flying in “micro-celebrities” on a clients campaign when that same budget could be utilized to reach out to local, participating, and vocal personalities is pretty strange. Even at the $2k to $5k budget, a good guerrilla marketing campaign to the 200 attendees breaks down to an additional $10 to $50 per head outreach. Perhaps that budget would have been a little better spent on local (and involved) professionals.

How is success measured?

I generally use a really basic system (dollars spent on promotion, conversion, usage metrics, etc) and have a goal upfront. In this case the goal was stated as “Reveal our full product roadmap to a group of industry bloggers and hope they would fall over backwards with praise for our innovative vision and transparent outreach.” and the impact (the fall over backwards part) didn’t happen, but still thought of as “wildly successful.”

I would love to hear from the participating companies if there was a bottom line impact of buying lunch or flying a group of attendees around with an almost non-existent impact online through the attendees. The strange tendency of big firms like Edelman to put dollars in ineffective social media outreach campaigns is leaving me baffled today.

What is your take on this type of public relations scenario?